Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Blue Jays Ending World Series

    Well, tonight it ends, one way or the other. Game 7 of the World Series starts (appropriately) at 7 Central.

    Win or lose, this will be a spectacular team, remembered along with the '92 and '93 teams that won it all. But the feeling I can't shake is that this'll be a one-off. Last year, the team was in last place. A lot of things broke right this year for them to win the division, and then the American League pennant.

    It's easy to look at a team of stars, and think, "well, they'll be back." That's often not the case - I often think about the 2010 and 2011 Texas Rangers, who lost the World Series both years. It was almost fifteen years before they'd make it back and win. Meanwhile, for the Blue Jays, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is 26. Bo Bichette 27. They're entering their primes, but play (as always) in the same division as the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. Winning the division is _hard_. Making the playoffs is easier than it used to be, since the league expanded the number of wildcard spots, but...

  • Stockholm Traffic Lights

    In Stockholm, traffic lights have a push button that pedestrians are supposed to press when they cross and all the type A personalities that’d press the button even when it had already been pressed and lit up used to bug me, an annoyance that persisted in me for maybe six months or so after I found out that no, it doesn’t “reset” the pushing and we don’t have to wait longer. It’s just a redundant, safely idempotent extra press for no benefit or effect. It’s fine.

  • COVID-19 vaccination

    Yesterday, at the pharmacy here in Zürich, when we asked for a Covid shot, we were told that it was only available for people 65 and older or people at-risk. I asked whether this is a matter of who pays or whether this is a matter of the state making it illegal? And what if we want to visit our parents who are around 80? The person at the desk decided to check in with the head pharmacist and came back to say that the federal department of health changed its position this week. It’s now OK to give us the shots. We still have to pay for it.

    How strange. Was it really forbidden to vaccinate us just a week earlier?

  • "The Courage To Be Disliked" book notes

    These are my personal book notes from Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga's "The Courage To Be Disliked". They are for me, but I hope they might be useful to you too.

  • Easter sweetbread from Greece: Tsoureki

    If you've read my thoughts on Halloween celebrations in the US, then my thoughts on Easter in the US won't come as much of a surprise: What's with all the rabbits, chickens, and "chocolate"? (That is, chocolate-flavored wax, if you're feeling a little more cynical about it.) Unlike Halloween, the "true meaning" of Easter is fairly obvious: It's a Christian holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. And it doesn't take a long to think that a holiday with rabbits and eggs in the Spring probably has something to do with a "pagan fertility celebrations", but the historians actually agree about very little here. There is good agreement on the etymology of the English word "Easter" being traced to a Anglo-Saxon / Germanic goddess "Ēostre", but there is little evidence of a relation to fertility here, as Ēostre is more strongly associated with the dawn (thus there probably is a connection between both "Easter" and "Ēostre" and the word "east"). Similarly, the association of eggs with fertility and life do go back into very ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and an association of rabbits with fertility always seems plausible, but there is reasonably little clear evidence of how long these have been important parts of Easter, or why they started being important parts of Easter. But what is reasonably clear is that both the name itself and the traditions of Easter have been influenced by preexisting culture in different regions.

  • For Hallowe'en, I'm half hoping we get all the kids so we have no candy left, and half hoping we get no kids so we have all the candy left

    For the past few years, fewer and fewer kids have been showing up on our door step looking for candy. That doesn't stop Bunny from being opimistic and overbuying candy just in case scores of kids come by and get candy, least we get our house redecorated with eggs and toilet paper. Me, I've always been surprised when any kids show up these days on Hallowe'en. So it was that Bunny bought way more candy than I felt we needed.

• Technology and Free Software

  • rfkill on Debian without /sbin/rfkill

    Today I installed Debian Bookworm on an old laptop. For the installation I used an ISO-image from last year:

    debian-12.8.0-amd64-netinst.iso

    I had downloaded this ISO in the past to install some virtual machines, and now used this again so I didn't have to download a new one.

    During the install it recognized the WiFi-chip, and a working wireless connection was set up. The installer downloaded a lot of packages, everything went fine.

  • Programming

    • "The Pragmatic Programmer" book notes

      These are my personal takeaways after reading "The Pragmatic Programmer" by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt. Note that the book contains much more knowledge wisdom and that these notes only contain points I personally found worth writing down. This is mainly for my own use, but you might find it helpful too.

    • Perl New Features and Foostats

      Perl recently reached rank 10 in the TIOBE index. That headline made me write this blog post as I was developing the Foostats script for simple analytics of my personal websites and Gemini capsules (e.g. `foo.zone`) and there were a couple of new features added to the Perl language over the last releases. The book *Perl New Features* by brian d foy documents the changes well; this post shows how those features look in a real program that runs every morning for my stats generation.